Rhubarb Vaselino lives in a small village, when he and his friend, Sapo, enter a bullfighting contest, Sapo dies, but Rhubarb kills three bulls and becomes a local hero earning money. Two years later, he is living in Madrid as a national hero , when he becomes involved with Filet de Sol, and his lover finds out, he must fight the most deadliest in Spain, in the last bull fight of the season.
~IMDB

Mud and Sand is a silent film starring Stan Laurel, that was filmed in 1922. Laurel plays a matador who makes a fool of a famous Spanish dancer. The dancer demands revenge and, in the end, kills the matador by throwing a concealed brick at him after a fight with the fiercest bull in Spain. The moral of the story, shown in the last scene, is: "If you want to live a long full life, cut out the bull!" The title spoofs the Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand, and many scenes directly parody that film.
~WIKIPEDIA

Stan Laurel was nearly killed during the making of this movie. In the scene where he is being chased down the street by a bull, it was a real bull chasing Stan, which caught up to him and nearly killed him. After this incident, the crew decided to scare Stan by telling him that the camera didn't get the picture, and the scene would have to be shot again.

This was one of a series of films that Stan Laurel did that were parodies of popular films. This four reel short was a parody of Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino and was in theatres only three months after that film was released.

Some of the titles in this story have a different font than the others. That's because they were added in later, to replace the original titles which had gone missing over the years (legend has it they were processed with inferior chemicals and were the first parts of the films to deteriorate).
~IMDB

It is a funny movie. That was a good comment one reviewer made, about how all the "fighting bulls" in the movie are Herefords, that white-faced moo-cow we're all familiar with.

(I don't THINK this is a spoiler) :
I like the way the matador wins a bull-fight. He's in this high-walled adobe bull ring, and you know he won a bout when the bull comes flying over the wall and lands in a heap. And similarly when the bull wins a bout.

Hi. I've seen "Mud and Sand" and it's hilarious, especially the dressing room scene. This brings up a question: in the original "Blood and Sand" there is a dressing room scene but in every DVD I've seen, that scene is either cut short, or missing altogether. For instance, the sash-wrapping is never shown.

Now it's been suggested to me that the scene was cut before "Blood and Sand" was released, but this can't be true. I say this because in "Mud and Sand," there is a comical sash-wrapping, among other things. There would have been no point in having a parody of such a scene unless the audience already knew what was being parodied, i.e., they would have to have recognized it from the original. This is why I feel the full-length dressing scene must have existed in the original "Blood and Sand."

Besides Stan Laurel,I love the music in the first 6 minutes of this video.Correct me if I'm wrong,but isn't this Jelly roll Morton?

Reviewer:Cat Lady -
-
October 30, 2007 Subject:
We almost lost Stan in this one

It's in the scene where his last bull is loose in the street, before they get to the arena. The bull chases him down the street, and you can see something happens way back down there away from the camera, but you can't see what. I thought at the time, that stunt guy had a close call. Well, it wasn't a stunt man. Per a note at the IMDB, it was Stan Laurel, and he did almost get killed by the bull down there. Apparently the film crew told him the scene as bad and he'd have to reshoot it. They had very grotesque senses of humor back then.

The bull in the last scene is a Hereford, and I may be wrong, but I don't think these pretty, placid animals have ever numbered among the fighting bulls of Spain. America was more rural back then and quite familiar with cattle breeds; this was probably one of the gags in the film.

A lot of the movie echoes the film it is parodying, but there are a couple of classic Stan Laurel moments that rise above that: where he messes around with Vaseline and hair spikes, and then in the arena where he suddenly does a few slow-motion leaps in the air for no particular reason at all, except that it's funny (he's supposed to be high on ether at that point). I'd like to think some of the puns were Laurel's, too:, notably the one where he tells his mother that old Sap finally got his. You can just hear him saying something along the same lines to Ollie, later on, and he did write a lot of their material.

Good movie! Just gave it a 3 because it's a parody, not totally original.

Before he was paired with Oliver Hardy in the late 1920s, Stan Laurel did solo shorts like this one, much in the style of Fatty Arbuckle or Buster Keaton. These days, Laurel's solo work is often forgotten or overlooked, but this parody is fine example.

As a parody of the Valentino silent "Blood and Sand," it follows humorous rise to fame of a small time matador from Spain. The gags (and surprising ly, the puns) in this film remain timeless, and you can see echos of these gags in Monty Python, Bugs Bunny or Woody Allen. There is also an unusual breaking of the fourth wall on occasion, which is make this film seem far ahead of its time in terms of comedy. Like many of the comedians of his era, Laurel is an incredible acrobat and performs the physically demanding stunts wonderfully. While not as daring as Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton (for example, there a couple cases where a dummy stands in briefly for Laurel), the timing and expressions are played to the hilt.

The condidtion of the print itself is a bit uneven, with some parts very dark, and the title cards done in a couple different styles (some probably original, and others from a later reissue in the 1940s?). For the most part, however, the film remains very watchable and most enjoyable.